Folio
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For the consultant with a product

Client work on one domain.
The product on another.

Consultants with a side product live in two voices — formal client correspondence on one domain, casual product release notes on another. Folio reads both in one inbox, signs each domain with its own DKIM key, and auto-selects the right From line when you reply. The boundary the client cares about is preserved; the boundary that was costing you context-switching disappears.

You bill hourly on one domain and sell seats on another. One identity writes careful, careful prose to procurement. The other announces releases to a list of strangers. Both are you. Both have to sound like themselves.

Folio keeps both identities visible in the margin — the consultancy stripe, the product stripe — so a reply from the consulting inbox never goes out with the product's casual voice, and vice versa.

Updated 11 May 2026 (2026-05-11)

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I · The problem with a consultancy and a product

Two tones, two audiences, one mailbox.

Consulting clients expect measured, billable, procurement-polite prose. Product users expect short, casual, ship-fast prose. When both land in the same inbox with the same From, the tone mismatch is constant — and the reputational risk runs both ways.

Worse: the product's cold-email reputation (which is inherently more aggressive) bleeds into the consultancy's domain if they share sending infrastructure. One accidental newsletter-to-prospects and suddenly a careful proposal to a Fortune 500 procurement office is sitting in spam.

The usual workaround is a second Google Workspace seat. Now your consultancy pays $7/month extra for a separate tenant, and you still have to mentally track which browser tab is which identity.

Your consultancy's credibility is partly the tone you write in. The product's speed is partly the tone it writes in. They should not share a From field.

II · A Tuesday at the desk

Two voices, one reader.

Not a screenshot — a live render in the same editorial design system the app uses. Each row's stripe is the domain the letter was sent to. Hover (or read quickly, by eye): which self is each one addressed to?

III · How the day changes

The right voice, automatically.

A letter arrives at the consultancy address; the reply goes out from the consultancy, signed by the consultancy's DKIM key, in the margin colour of the consultancy. A letter arrives at the product address; same, but for the product. You don't pick. The software does.

  • ·
    Two identities, separate signatures. The consultancy's DKIM key and the product's DKIM key are distinct. Their reputations are decoupled at the protocol layer.
  • ·
    Tone mismatch prevented by design. The From is pre-filled on reply from the address the letter arrived at. You don't accidentally send procurement-polite prose from the product's casual From.
  • ·
    One flat price, not two Workspace seats. Consultancy and product live on one Folio subscription. No $14/month overhead just to keep the identities separate.
  • ·
    Aliases per identity. press@, hello@, billing@, legal@ — as many addresses under each domain as you need, all colour-matched to the parent.

IV · The parts that matter at billable hour 800

Deliverability that doesn't drift.

The thing that ruins a consultancy's email is usually not the tool — it's the year-long slow-drift of sending reputation. These are the pieces Folio handles so your drift stays flat.

Per-domain DKIM + DMARC
Each domain gets its own key and its own policy. p=quarantine by default; aggregate reports route to a dmarc-rua@ mailbox Folio manages on that domain and surface in your Deliverability dashboard — no separate reporting-authorization record to publish.
Bounces & complaints caught early
Dead addresses on the product list don't drag the consultancy's reputation. The suppression list is per-domain.
Threading that Gmail respects
Replies fold cleanly into the original thread in procurement's Outlook and the user's Gmail. No orphan replies.
Magic-link auth
No password to rotate when a client asks for your 'secure email' policy. Single-use, fifteen-minute, bound to the address issued.

V · Common questions

Questions readers ask.

Can a consultancy and a SaaS product share one inbox without confusing client correspondence?

Yes. Each domain renders with its own color stripe in the message list, its own From line, and its own signature. The reading view is unified; the sending identity is not. Replies to a client message default to the client-facing domain.

Does this satisfy a client's 'professional email' requirement?

Yes. Outbound messages from your consultancy domain are signed with that domain's DKIM key (per RFC 6376) and SPF-aligned against Amazon SES. A client checking message headers sees a properly authenticated message from your firm's domain — no shared @gmail.com sending.

Can I separate billing for the consultancy and the product side?

Folio bills as a single subscription per operator; the deliverability boundary is at the domain level, not the bill. Most consultants categorize the whole subscription as a business expense for the consultancy and treat the product domain as a sub-tenant.

What about NDAs and confidential client material?

All inbound mail is delivered over TLS via the Haraka MTA and stored with at-rest encryption in Amazon S3 and DynamoDB. Per-domain DKIM means a leak on the product side cannot impersonate the consultancy. See the privacy page for full data-handling details.

How do I move existing client threads in?

Most consultants begin by changing only the MX record for one domain — inbound mail flows into Folio while existing archives stay where they are. There is no destructive migration. The /migrate/google-workspace guide covers the no-downtime cutover.

VI · Adjacent readers

Other shapes of the same problem.

VII · Sources & further reading

Where the claims come from.

Open the first letter

One reader. Two voices, preserved.

Start free, no card. Bind the consultancy domain or the product domain. Send one careful proposal or one casual release note. Notice the tone land where it belongs — automatically. Upgrade when you want both domains in the same inbox.

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Updated 11 May 2026 (2026-05-11)